Man who died after tasing was victim of ‘Jim Crow policing,’ family, supporters say
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Death of Darryl “Tyree” Williams
Ongoing coverage from The News & Observer on the tasing and death of 32-year-old Darryl Williams in Raleigh police custody on Jan. 17, 2023.
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Supporters of a 32-year-old man who died after being tased by Raleigh police officers last week said Tuesday he was a victim of racial profiling and “Jim Crow policing.”
“Darryl Williams should not be dead,” social justice activist Kerwin Pittman said during a news conference at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Gardens, just a few feet from the Supreme Sweepstakes parlor on Rock Quarry Road where police encountered Williams.
“Nobody called Raleigh Police Department to the scene,” Pittman said. “Raleigh Police Department decided to show up on their own and do what they call ‘proactive patrolling.’”
“We got to call a spade a spade,” he said. “Proactive patrolling is racial profiling of marginalized communities. It is finding an excuse when there is no excuse [other than] to stop minorities. ... Nothing more.”
Tuesday’s news conference responded to a report released by Police Chief Estella Patterson on Monday. It said police tased Williams three times after they found a folded dollar bill on him containing a substance with “the appearance of cocaine” and he resisted their attempts to arrest him.
After the first tasing with an officer’s stun gun, Williams managed to get up and run, according to the report. He was tased twice more over 50 seconds.
Between the second and third tasing, “Mr. Williams can be heard on [police officers’] body-worn camera saying, ‘I have heart problems,’” the police report states.
Police performed CPR until Emergency Medical Services personnel arrived, the report states. He was pronounced dead at the hospital about an hour later.
The report states officers found two firearms, marijuana and another drug in Williams’ car.
But attorney Dawn Blagrove, executive director of Emancipate NC, called the report “propaganda” that “tells the story you want to tell instead of what actually happened.”
“This report is designed to malign the victim, to malign the murder victim,” she said. “It doesn’t natter what they found in his car. What matters is that on that night, he was bothering no one. He was minding his own business.”
Criticism of the report and RPD
“This is unconstitutional, this is a violation of civil rights, but most importantly, this is a violation of our human rights,” Pittman said. “We have the right to go about in peace. We have that right as human beings.”
Both Blagrove and Pittman criticized proactive patrolling, which they say happens mostly in Southeast Raleigh, where more Black residents in the city live.
In the report, police described Rock Quarry Road as an area with a “a history of repeat calls for service for drugs, weapons, and other criminal violations.”
“Just because an area receives heavy calls does not mean that regular citizens cannot go over there without being harassed,” Pittman said.
Blagrove added that heavy policing in Black and brown communities isn’t new.
“The same reason that we have over half of our population in prison [who are] Black and brown, the same reason we have disproportionate Black and brown children suspended from schools is because we live in a system that is racist,” she said.
Blagrove said the five-day report was full of “inconsistent falsehoods.”
“As an example, it starts off by saying, the Raleigh Police Department was conducting a drug investigation, yet two paragraphs down, it also says that the police officers were doing something called preventative policing,” Blagrove said.
Echoing Pittman, she called preventative policing, or proactive patrolling, a “euphemism for stop-and-search” and for “Jim Crow-era policing.”
“(The department) fails to follow its own policies and procedures and most importantly, does not respect or value the lives of Black people in Southeast Raleigh,” she said.
In their guidelines, Raleigh police officers are instructed not to deploy their stun guns while a person is running away from them.
The first deployment, detailed in the report, was from C. D. Robinson, who was able to temporarily stop Williams, causing him to fall. The second deployment from Robinson came as Williams fled from officers, running “a short distance across the parking lot.”
Tasers emit 50,000 volts of electricity and are intended to temporarily paralyze a person. They are intended to be used as non-lethal weapons, however more than 500 people have died in the United States after being tased by a police officer.
Days before Williams died, Keenan Anderson, died after he was tased by officers with the Los Angeles Police Department on Jan. 3.
Demands for Raleigh Police
“(Darryl) needs to be the last in Raleigh to die at the hands of state-sanctioned violence, at the police of Raleigh Police Department,” Blagrove said.
She read a list of demands that included:
▪ Firing the officers involved in the incident. Six Raleigh police officers have been placed on administrative leave, which the Police Department says is standard procedure in such incidents.
▪ Charging the officers with murder
▪ Ending “preventative policing,” which Blagrove called the “Raleigh Police Department’s own version of stop and frisk.”
“It makes no sense that our citizens cannot go into any community establishment, area, in Raleigh without being harassed unjustifiably under the pretense of proactive patrolling,” she said.
▪ Halting taser use until all officers know the rules for using them
▪ Dissolving or replacing the members of the city’s police advisory board
▪ Requiring police to carry individual liability insurance
‘We just want answers’
Sonya Williams, Darryl’s mother, did not speak at Tuesday’s news conference but stood quietly alongside the activists and supporters.
Toward the end of the event, she sat behind the crowd on a bench and wiped her eyes.
Danielle Madden spoke for her, saying “a piece of our hearts have been taken from us.”
“We just want answers on what happened to Darryl, and not saying that the answers will completely heal her heart,” Madden said. “But it will give her a little bit of resolve, a little bit of peace to be able to sleep at night, because she has not been able to do that.”
Williams was her first-born child.
“If any of you have ever lost a child then you can only understand how she feels,” Madden said.
This story was originally published January 24, 2023 at 11:43 AM.
